Abstract

Editorials

Those today responsible for the conduct of the periodical The Nation look back to its fifty years of life with a kind of proud humility. The secure past is not theirs, yet they, as inheritors of a high tradition, must not discredit it. The periodical's influence in shaping the American press was out of all proportion to the mere number of its readers. It did not strive nor cry. The effects it wrought were subtle and insinuated, never clamorous. A virtue went out from it, which was unconsciously absorbed by many newspaper writers. They could scarcely hate said where they got their new impulse to exercise a judgment independent of party. All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed. Today the most powerful newspapers in the United States are those, which have the reputation of being always ready, on a question of real principle, to snap the green withes with which politicians would bind them.